Machine type communication (MTC) will be an important application in the future communications field. The MTC may be applied to smart metering, medical detection, logistics detection, fire monitoring, wearable device communication, and the like. In the MTC, user equipment generally has relatively low power consumption, so as to increase a standby time of the user equipment, and reduce labor costs for changing a battery.
To reduce user equipment power consumption, when the user equipment does not need to send uplink data or currently has no downlink service, the user equipment enters an idle state. In the idle state, the user equipment may enter a long-term sleep mode, that is, a receiver may be disabled to save power.
However, to balance a power saving effect and a delay to some extent, the user equipment needs to periodically wake up to monitor downlink data that may be received. For example, each idle-state user equipment attempts to receive a paging request message at a paging moment corresponding to the user equipment. However, possibly, most user equipments actually do not receive a paging request message. In this case, the user equipments still need to read all physical downlink control channels (PDCCH), and then can determine that the user equipments are not scheduled at paging moments. This is disadvantageous to reduction of user equipment power consumption. For another example, in a random access procedure, when receiving a random access request sent by user equipment and allowing access for the user equipment, the base station feeds a random access response packet back to the user equipment in N frames. In this case, after sending the random access request, the user equipment successively monitors N frames, receives and decodes all PDCCH signaling or physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) data packets that may carry a random access response packet, and detects whether the corresponding random access response packet is fed by the base station back to the user equipment. However, because uplink and downlink resources are limited, the base station does not determine a frame that is of the N frames and in which the base station sends the random access response packet to the user equipment. Therefore, the user equipment needs to monitor multiple frames to detect whether the base station feeds the random access response packet back. This is disadvantageous to reduction of user equipment power consumption. For still another example, in a common uplink scheduling and downlink scheduling solution, connected-state user equipment successively monitors several PDCCH scheduling moments to determine whether the user equipment is scheduled. In other words, the user equipment may be scheduled at each scheduling moment, but the user equipment is scheduled only at one scheduling moment. However, in this case, the user equipment still needs to monitor all possible scheduling moments. Therefore, user equipment power consumption is also wasted.